Just as the shockwaves of Prince Harry’s memoir start to subside, so Prince Andrew pops up his doltish head again. It’s whack-a-mole time for Charles III.
Andrew is determined to clear his name and make a return to public duties. At first glance, it’s a battle he’s unlikely to win. Virginia Giuffre, the woman who accused the prince of sexual abuse, has reportedly signed a multi-million dollar deal to write a memoir about her abuse by the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
And King Charles has apparently already made his feelings known, with The Sun claiming he has kicked Andrew and his belongings out of his Buckingham Palace flat “due to renovation work”. Andrew is so puffed up with self-regard and self-satisfaction with his position that only someone higher up the food chain – i.e. the King – will be able to stop his comeback dreams.
Andrew is no doubt heartened by Ms Giuffre dropping her sexual abuse claims against American lawyer Alan Dershowitz, admitting she “may have made a mistake”. Some prominent voices are saying Andrew may be innocent, after all, despite him paying Ms Giuffre a rumoured £9.7m to bring an end to a civil case she brought against him.
Andrew has little chance of a comeback if King Charles has anything to do with it. In the build-up to the coronation on 6 May, the King already has to deal with the burning question – will he invite the Duke and Duchess of Sussex? He can’t afford to have the other black sheep of the family return to the fold.
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The Royal Family can be ruthless in rejecting anyone in danger of causing them embarrassment. Look at poor Lady Susan Hussey, the Queen’s former lady-in-waiting, flung to the wolves after a minor hoo-ha at a Buckingham Palace party. Charles has, thank God, seen sense in inviting Lady Hussey (who, I should say, is a cousin of mine) to the coronation.
Don’t expect any similar rapprochement with Prince Andrew. It’s more likely that he will remain excluded from royal life – in the same way that Crawfie (the Queen’s nanny, Marion Crawford) was exiled from the Royal Household after she wrote her charming, flattering book, The Little Princesses (1950), about the young Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret.
The King can keep Andrew in exile with a clean conscience, because it was his mother who rubber-stamped that exile in the first place. The prince was effectively cancelled a year ago, when his mother was still alive. He stopped using his HRH title (even though it wasn’t formally removed) and his honourary military positions were stripped from him.
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Prince Andrew’s humiliation was complete. How can he possibly recover? Giuffre looks very unlikely to retract her allegations against him. Her killer piece of evidence – the picture of her with Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell – is the biggest obstacle to any comeback, even if Andrew and Maxwell claim they have no recollection of being with her in London on the evening in question.
Whatever happens, Andrew will always carry the albatross of that car crash of an interview with Emily Maitlis around his neck. Once you have a whole nation laughing at your peculiar non-sweating condition and your visit to Woking Pizza Express, you’re finished.
The links between the monarchy and the people are long-lasting, but they are easily snapped. King Charles knows he is only where he is thanks to the unsaid approval of most of the nation. Those links start to fray when the people start laughing at an institution they once revered.
The ejection of a brother from the Firm has happened before. Yes, Edward VIII chose to leave the institution to marry the divorcée Wallis Simpson. Once he was out, though, he was out – banished to a non-job as Governor of the Bahamas during the war, to marginalise his worrying pro-German views. To the Duke of Windsor’s enduring disappointment, his duchess was never granted the HRH title. The Duke of Windsor didn’t even make it to the Queen’s Coronation in 1953 after the then prime minister, Winston Churchill, advised against it.
Prince Andrew is bound to go to the coronation, but is unlikely to play any formal part in it. In any case, long before the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, Andrew’s star was already in decline. When he was Prince of Wales, Charles was determined the focus of the Royal Household should be on the Queen and Prince Philip, Camilla and himself, William and Kate and their three children.
In other words, Prince Andrew was never part of the royal future even before his disgrace. There can be no spectacular comeback.
Harry Mount is author of Et Tu, Brute? The Best Latin Lines Ever